Is this real?
Yes, 100%. IIRC, it took 3 months and 500 takes, but everything you see is exactly as it happened, and everything is a genuine part from a Honda.
Yes it is. It took over 600 takes to make everything work correctly.
No trick photography.
Awsome stuff.
Correction - there’s a link in the middle, which joins two takes. Only one was used in the TV advert (the whole thing would have been longer than a whole ad break!), hence my earlier reply.
There is no way it could be real. How could three car tires roll uphill and gain speed while doing so?
Read the links.
I agree, it’s real. You gotta admire Honda for doing it.
Peace,
mangeorge
Thanks all. Very cool
The concept, while beautifully executed, was taken (stolen?) from an equally amazing 30-minute film made by Peter Fischli and David Weiss in the 1980s called The Way Things Go. It’s now available on DVD.
BTW, in case you didn’t notice, the ad’s voiceover announcer was Garrison Keillor.
Really? I thought of the Mouse Trap game, which I’m sure came before 1980.
What, you people never heard of Rube Goldberg?
And then there was Rube’s British counterpart: Heath Robinson.
Something I’ve wondered about this ad:
Why on Earth did they bother doing this ‘in camera’?! Three months and 600+ takes?! That had to be much more expensive than compositing it with CG.
I mean, yeah, its really really cool watching it knowing they did it the old fashioned way. But this wasn’t some student’s art film, it was a freakin’ commercial!
You answered your own question. It’s cool. It generated a lot of buzz. I don’t know how many cars it sold, though. It would have been interesting to see the reaction if they had used it in the US.
But it probably didn’t take a whole lot of manpower to do it. If you had four people working full time for 3 months, that’s only one man-year. Even if they get an average of $100,000 a year, that’s less than 1/3 the average cost of producing a national TV commercial (cite).
I think the time investment was not as big a deal for Honda as the car investment. Those were the parts from one actual car that was disassembled to make the commercial. A prototype for a vehicle that they were still building the assembly line to mass-produce. One of only a handful (two or three, IIRC) that existed at the time …
Commercial producer: “Can we use one of those prototypes for our commercial?”
Engineer: “I suppose. What do you want to do with it?”
Commercial producer: “Completely disassemble it and use the parts to …”
Engineer: " :eek: :eek: :eek: "
Thanks. I once caught the last few minutes of that on PBS and was never able to find out the name of the movie.
Post #3 has the link that says the film cost 6 Million. Probably much more than a CG production.